Galaxy’s Edge is a Hugo-nominated bi-monthly magazine published by Phoenix Pick, the science fiction and fantasy imprint of Arc Manor, an award winning independent press based in Maryland. Each issue of the magazine has a mix of new and old stories, a serialization of a novel, columns by Barry Malzberg and Gregory Benford, book recommendations by Jody Lynn Nye and Bill Fawcett and an interview conducted by Joy Ward.

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by Mike Resnick

Welcome to the twenty-fourth issue of Galaxy’s Edge. This issue marks the conclusion of four successful years, which is probably about three and a half more than knowledgeable insiders gave us when we started.

This issue we present new and newer writers Paul Eckheart, Marina J. Lostetter, Nick DiChario (who’s a little less new than most), Edward M. Lerner, Liz Colter, Fabio F. Centamore, Neal Peart, and Larry Hodges. Plus old friends Mercedes Lackey, Kevin J. Anderson, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and 2016 Worldcon Guest of Honor Michael Swanwick. Also included are book recommendations by Bill Fawcett and Jody Lynn Nye, Greg Benford’s science column, Barry N. Malzberg’s column on literary matters, and the Joy Ward interview this month is with a true giant in the field, Robert Silverberg. Hope you enjoy all of them.

We are also exceptionally proud to begin serialization of Robert A. Heinlein’s Hugo-winning Double Star with this issue.

* * *

I told this story during my Worldcon Guest of Honor speech back at Chicon 7 in 2012. A number of people have asked me to commit it to paper (which I had done decades ago in some fanzine), so here it is again: Me and the High Priest.

I first met Anton LaVey, the founder and high priest of the Church of Satan, back in August of 1968, long before I was a full-time science fiction writer. I’d sold a pair of pretty awful Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches, but basically I was just a kid starting out, editing a couple of men’s magazines and tabloid called The National Insider, which was like The National Enquirer only worse. The Worldcon was in Berkeley that year, and of course we planned to go.

Carol and I had never been to the Bay area, so I decided we’d go a few days early, spend them in San Francisco, and I’d line up a story or an interview each day to cover the expenses. During those four days I interviewed Carol Doda (the first topless dancer), the Low Moan Spectacular (a brilliant comedy group), and Anton.

I still remember taking a cab to his house, which was an old Victorian monstrosity painted black from top to bottom. There was a hearse parked in front of it, a lion roaming the (fenced) back yard, and Anton answered the door dressed exactly like a priest, with one exception—instead of a cross, he was wearing a tiny coffin on a chain around his neck.

For some reason we hit it off. He had a huge collection of Arkham House books. I’d read a batch of them, and had actually known a handful of the authors, so we had something to talk about besides Satanism. After awhile I pulled out my camera, one of the girls shed her clothes, and Anton presided over a black mass.

It was dull as dishwater, and it’s really difficult to be dull when you’re chanting obscene spells over a gorgeous naked girl on a makeshift altar. I explained that the Malleus Maleficarum and the Compendium Maleficarum were fine textbooks, but he was sitting on hundreds of wonderful (and occasionally Satanic) poems by Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft in his Arkham collection, poems that had beat and meter—and eventually he did incorporate some of them into his ceremonies. (You can hear the The Satanic Masses, an LP/vinyl record he released a couple of years later.)

He was our guest at Baycon’s masquerade, and I commissioned a regular weekly column from him for the Insider. We became friends, in spite of the fact that I used to drive him crazy by calling him Anthony Levy (which seemed more likely to be his real name) and he was our house guest whenever a book-plugging tour brought him to our area.

Do I believe in Satanism? Of course not, no more than I believe in anything else. But let me tell you a little story, which happens to be true.

I used to phone him from the office whenever one of his columns came in, just to go over changes and corrections (this was many years before faxes, scans, and e-mails), and once I phoned him just after lunch on December 24. He mentioned that he’d forgotten to buy me a Christmas present (said the Satanist to the Jewish atheist), and was there anything he could get me? I said that it was starting to snow, and I’d sure love for him to use his Satanic connections to get me the hell out of there in the next ten minutes, since the city figured to be in gridlock by quitting time. It was just a thing to say, honest. I never expected what came next.

He mumbled some incomprehensible chant in an unknown language and told me it was taken care of, and I could go home in ten minutes. Then he hung up.

And thirty seconds later the power went off, and when it didn’t come on again in five minutes, the publisher sent everyone home and closed up shop for the day.

Was it Anton? I sure as hell doubt it. Did it happen? Absolutely. Can I prove that it wasn’t Anton? Nope. Did he take full credit for it for the next ten years? Of course. Could he do it again? I don’t know. I decided never to ask for another favor. I mean, hell, if I was wrong and he did shut off the power from 3,000 miles away, I knew what church I definitely did not want to be beholden to.

Anton died twenty years ago. We’d lost touch with each other by the late 1970s, and in truth we were never very close friends. But when I think back on all the colorful people I’ve known, he ranks right up there near the top.

Larry Hodges has sold more than seventy stories, including seven to Galaxy’s Edge. His third novel, Campaign 2100: Game of Scorpions, was recently published by World Weaver Press.

ZOMBIES ANONYMOUS

by Larry Hodges

A zombie has no moral compass. That’s why I had no compunctions about eating David, my best friend, and his tuna fish sandwich. Apparently there’s something morally wrong with this, but I’m not sure why. When I was cornered by zombies in front of his house, David let me in and saved me. We discussed the situation while eating lunch. We didn’t realize I had been bitten until after I turned. Perhaps it was wrong for me to eat his tuna fish sandwich, since it was his, but I was really hungry.

I was a little full when I cornered his daughter Suzy in her bedroom. She was screaming like humans do when faced with a zombie. I don’t know why. Her mom had also been screaming when she ran out the front door. There seemed something wrong about this, but I’m not sure why—shouldn’t moms and daughters stay together, like mashed potatoes and gravy? But gravy is good, even à la carte.

I figured I’d eat only some of Suzy and leave the rest for later. Or maybe not—even zombies can overeat, and I had a lot of David in me. She was eighteen, with pale, juicy skin, dressed in a red polka-dot party dress. Spattered blood would ruin the aesthetically pleasing white dots. I remember many years ago my mom making smiley faces out of my food on my plate, and I still ate it, so I guess that’s the price of eating.

Why aren’t you eating me? asked Suzy as I paced about, figuring how much of Suzy I could fit inside of me. I was once a math professor—David and I were colleagues at the university and we were both still wearing our tweed jackets with the elbow patches—and being a zombie didn’t dull my three-dimensional geometry skills. Any more than an arm or a head and I’d burst. Of course, that would just let out some of David, allowing me to eat more of Suzy, so there was that. I continued to pace about, opening and closing my jaws in silent calculation. Every time I used pi in an equation it only made me hungrier.

Professor Wills, I’m guessing you ate so much of my dad that you don’t have room for more, she said, trembling slightly. Am I right? A smart child. Her long blond hair would be convenient for holding her when I ate her, like a stick on a lollipop.

I’ve known you all my life, she continued. I don’t think you want to eat me. Perhaps not so smart after all. For what possible reason wouldn’t I want to eat her just because I’d known her a long time? Would she avoid eating canned tuna just because the can had been in the pantry a long time? I didn’t see the logic. Even zombies digest food, and soon I’d have room for her to join her father. V=4/3πabc doesn’t lie.

There’s a program for people like you, said Suzy. Zombies Anonymous. It’s a step-by-step program for zombies to recover and stop being zombies. Would you like to learn more about it?

I vaguely remembered hearing of this, but only as a joke spread at horror conventions. After the Zombie Apocalypse, it might have been taken more seriously, but most of us were fixated on avoiding zombies and staying alive, though I don’t remember why. It sounded like Alcoholics Anonymous. I stared down at her, my head tilted slightly sideways like my dog when she wanted a treat. I wonder what canine tastes like. I held up ten fingers, and then two.

No, it’s not like the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, she said. Those steps rely on God saving you. If there were a God, there wouldn’t be zombies running around eating people, would there?

That did raise an interesting question. A benevolent God would have hobbled people so we could catch them more easily. But this raised a separate question. Was there any reason why I wouldn’t want to continue being a zombie? I couldn’t think of any.

There are only three steps to Zombies Anonymous, continued Suzy. First, you must admit you are powerless over being a zombie.

I could agree to that. After all, I was a zombie. Does a tuna have to admit it is powerless over being a tuna if it wants to stop being a tuna? Did you know human brains taste like tuna? Yum.

The second step, Suzy said, is to decide that you don’t want to be a zombie.

Hold the tuna sandwiches! Why wouldn’t I want to be a zombie? What were the alternatives? Going back to being a human chased by herds of zombies? Feeling pain? The constant constraints of a moral compass? I’d managed to navigate life as a human right into adulthood, but it hadn’t been easy. Getting my PhD in math would have been a lot easier if I’d been able to cheat on exams and eat the bad professors. But for the sake of argument, I’d conditionally accept the idea that I didn’t want to be a zombie.

The final step, Suzy said, is to stop acting like a zombie.

No eating people? Learn a moral compass? That was a bit much. Would you ask a tuna to stop acting like a tuna? Would that change the fact that it was still a tuna?

You won’t eat me, Suzy said. I know it. You’ve been a friend of the family for years. You only ate my dad because you were in a zombie frenzy, but you’re over that now. Before you turned, you were the nicest person I ever knew; you were my hero. You even inspired me to get this. She held out her arm, showing me that tattoo on her forearm of the famous math equation, eπi+1=0.

I had been a nice person, though of course nice is just part of that moral compass thing. But I remember being proud of being nice. I could still be nice. And so I took Suzy’s arm in mine.

And took a big bite out of it. It was all part of Humans Anonymous, that one-step program I’d just invented to introduce weak, moralistic humans to the freedom of zombiehood. In just minutes, Suzy would stop screaming, and then, together, we could hunt down her mom (mashed potatoes!) and the neighbors, and if we still had room, maybe get a tuna sandwich.

Nick DiChario is a multiple Hugo nominee, a Campbell nominee, and a World Fantasy Award nominee, as well as the author of two novels. This is his fourth appearance in Galaxy’s Edge.

GIOVANNI’S TREE

by Nick DiChario

The dark-skinned stranger was a poor man who wore threadbare sandals and a robe made not of silk but of yarn from a pauper’s handloom. He held a staff not of fine, finished wood, but of a coarse and gnarled olive tree. When I met him, I was the village magistrate, a dubious distinction that fell to the oldest man in town, like it or not. I’d already lived almost fifty years and had no right to ask for more, but I had every reason to be nervous about strangers. Many a magistrate before me had fallen to the sword, slain by the Greeks, the Phoenicians, and the Carthaginians, just to name a few.

After I introduced myself, and the man made no move to kill me, we sat on a stone together, and everyone gathered around, curious to know who he was and where he’d come from. He spoke in Latin and said his name was Giovanni Cristo, and he’d traveled far and wide. He asked me for news, and I told him what little I knew such as I’d heard it. He wanted to know the name of our village. "Umbra in Mare," I answered in Latin. Shadow on the Sea.

He nodded. I’ve heard of it.

Not many have, I replied.

You’re too modest. In many cities I’ve visited, your wine is known as the best.

Yes, I agreed, I suppose it is. There was no point in denying it.

He pushed his long, tangled hair off his shoulders and held me in his gaze. He had thick, intimidating eyebrows, but soft eyes that seemed to light his smile. He pulled a tatty rag out of his pocket and mopped his face. I’ve come to warn you of an advancing storm.

The sun beat down so hotly I was sure my chest hairs were burning under my tunic. I called my wife, who’d been watching and listening nervously, and asked her to bring us a pitcher of wine and some bread. I turned to the others and told them to leave us alone, and then I spoke quietly to Giovanni. We’ve seen many storms. We’ll survive another.

You’ve not seen a storm like this. This storm is the Roman storm. You can’t stop it.

We haven’t stopped any of them. Why do we need to stop this one?

He smiled a knowing smile. So that you can hide your wine, of course.

I couldn’t help but laugh. We have too much wine to hide. It fills every home and every storeroom in the village. We bury it along the shores of the sea to keep it cool during the summers. Huge casks line the walls of every cave on the hillside. When visitors come, friend or enemy, we give it freely and invite them to take as much as they want. Our wine has outlasted all the conquerors before the Romans. What makes you think Rome will be different?

My wife returned with a loaf of bread, a pitcher and two cups. She knelt before us, filled the cups, and placed them at our feet. She backed away slowly, hoping to hear more of our conversation. A nosy cat, that one. I wish I could remember her name.

Giovanni and I broke bread, and I gave him a cup of wine and took one for myself. He had strong hands, I noticed, and knuckles like chestnuts.

The Romans will be worse than all the others put together, he said. They’ll strangle you with taxes, divide your property among their aristocracy, steal every grape you grow on your vines, pillage your land, and whip you like dogs while they do it. Everything you know will wither and die. They’ll make you slaves in your own land. For three hundred years you will suffer.

I thought Giovanni was crazy. How could he know such things? And yet he spoke with such calm certainty, and his voice held so much compassion and melancholy that I felt a maggot of doubt squirm inside me. We drank our wine in silence. Giovanni relished every sip. When we finished our cups, he said that he was delighted to have finally tasted the wine he’d heard so much about, and it was indeed the finest he’d ever had.

Is there really a way to hide it? I asked, on the off chance he knew what he was talking about.

Bring me a twig, Giovanni answered.

I found a short stick and handed it to him. He carried it to the center of the village and stuck it in the ground. Then he took what remained of our pitcher of wine and poured it in a circle around the stick. Much to my surprise, I saw the twig grow a finger taller and a finger wider.

An illusion, I said, and asked my wife to fetch another pitcher.

Giovanni poured the next carafe around the twig, and as the wine disappeared into the ground, the stick grew again. My wife gasped, her beaky nose poking over my shoulder.

More people came to look, and they brought more wine, and soon all the villagers had gathered around the stick to see what they were already calling a miracle. As Giovanni took each gourd of wine and poured it in his circle, the stick continued to grow until it was as tall and wide as